All this week, we’re celebrating the losers — those talented filmmakers whom Oscar has foolishly overlooked. Landon Palmer interviews two film scholars responsible for a new book on the life and work of director Nicholas Ray, perhaps the most glorified loser in Hollywood history. Nicholas Ray’s films were about outsiders, rebels and...

I know what you’re thinking. Steven Spielberg — the guy behind Raiders of the Lost Ark, Schindler’s List, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Hook — influenced… Joe Swanberg? Any confusion you may have is fair. Swanberg isn’t a director known for his visual flare, but that may change soon. With Digging for Fire, he’s directed his...

Eastbound and Down is one of the few comedic shows to actually stick its landing. That very, very loose autobiography Powers wrote? Spot on. That show has given us plenty of unforgettable lines and moments. The four seasons were consistent with the laughs and, best of all, never softened Kenny Powers....

At first glance, it may look like J.C. Chandor is hopping from one genre to the next, but the versatile writer/director has in fact built a rather unyielding trio of thematically cohesive stories, sharing the common denominator of characters facing extreme, in-the-moment crisis. Margin Call navigated the troubled waters of...

Within the logo of Amblin Entertainment lies one of Steven Spielberg’s most iconic images: a boy flying on a bicycle with a shrouded extraterrestrial friend in tow. This image also provides a fitting summary of how Spielberg’s films have been popularly understood — as wondrous, spectacular articulations of imagination seemingly...

The long-fabled director’s cut of Clive Barker‘s Nightbreed finally saw release this past week via Scream Factory’s beautiful new Blu-ray, and those of us who’ve been eagerly awaiting it since 1990 have one person to thank for it. That one person is Barker, obviously, as he not only wrote the...

Last summer Jake Gyllenhaal dropped out of Into the Woods to film Dan Gilroy‘s Nightcrawler. When the two production schedules clashed, the actor had to ask himself: should I make some bank off the huge Disney musical or take a pay cut to star in the directorial debut of the guy who wrote The Fall and The...

Jason Reitman is a hard filmmaker to pin down. He’s made six features, and when a director has made that many films, it’s usually not terribly difficult to find themes or ideas that tie a filmography together. Besides generally following smart but naive characters, you can’t really do that with...

Let’s not beat around the proverbial toilet-shaped bush here… the first ABCs of Death is a pretty dire affair. Out of 26 short films there are maybe a Billy Barty-sized handful of good to great ones with the remainder being a mix of lazy, dumb and poorly executed ideas. The...

When Open Windows was making the festival rounds, it played like an increasingly crazy kidnapping yarn where all the action happens on a single laptop screen. Since it’s hitting theaters after August 31st (November 7th to be exact), Nacho Vigalondo‘s movie about an actress held against her will plays out very much like...

The definition of spoiler used to be pretty black-and-white. Back in the summer of 1980, was it a spoiler telling someone Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father? Without a doubt. How about telling someone Bruce Willis is actually a ghost in the 1999 film The Sixth Sense? Absolutely. Or what about in...

Josh Brolin‘s performance in Sin City: A Dame to Kill For isn’t wildly dissimilar to his work in Men in Black III. They’re very different films and performances, of course, but both prequels feature Brolin inheriting a role from another actor. Brolin eerily embodied Tommy Lee Jones as Agent K, while in Sin City: A...

Marvel Studios is still new. Based on their track record, that’s almost hard to believe. Of the nine movies they’ve put out, all of them have performed considerably well, if not completely gangbusters, at the box office. Considering their latest film, Guardians of the Galaxy, is on track to make over $70m...

At the start of Guardians of the Galaxy, “A Film By James Gunn” flashes on the screen, and that’s exactly what we get. For a big Marvel movie under the Disney banner, this isn’t the kind of story we expect to see from them, so when the end credits roll, Gunn’s name...

Three years ago writer/director Kevin Smith pushed himself as a filmmaker with Red State. The quasi-horror movie was polarizing for both Smith’s fans and critics. Good or bad, it’s definitely far more ambitious than Smith’s previous movie, Cop Out. He was trying something new. Red State was a 180 turn in the director’s career. With his new picture, Tusk, Smith...

The filmmakers behind Horns had a wealth of material at their disposal. Author Joe Hill‘s novel easily could’ve been adapted into a miniseries, which is an idea even the film’s director, Alexandre Aja (The Hills Have Eyes), endorses. It’s not a gigantic book, but it tells more than one story, both tonally and structurally. Hill’s novel goes from...

When some actors and directors promote an adaptation or remake they’ll pretend they’ve always been fans of the original movie or the comic. You can generally tell when they’re lying, trying to pander to fans. Thankfully, real die-hard fans often get to be a part of properties that actually mean something to them....

At the start of Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomorrow our hero, Major Bill Cage (Tom Cruise), is a coward. He’s more than ready to run from a fight he knows he’s not equipped for. That’s not the kind of hero we expect from a blockbuster, but it’s the type of subversive choice we should...